There’s a version of hard times where you spend a lot of energy measuring. What other people started with, what was handed to them, what you didn’t have that they did. It makes a certain kind of sense; it’s one way of explaining the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and honestly, some of it is accurate. The world isn’t fair. Some people start further ahead, and that’s just true.

I’m not going to pretend I started from nothing. My parents paid for my state college and I graduated without undergraduate debt, which is a real advantage. But I also arrived in the Bay Area after failing out of college the first time, with no real opportunity and no roadmap, and what followed wasn’t a straight line up. I got knocked down more than once, found myself in genuinely difficult situations I’m not going to detail here, and had to figure out on my own how to build back each time, without a template and without anyone handing me the next step.

At some point in the middle of all that, I stopped having the bandwidth to think about what everyone else had. Not because I’d arrived at some clean philosophy about it, but because I was trying to survive, and surviving required all of my attention pointed in one direction. What did I need to do next? What could I actually control? What was I going to make of the situation I was in, rather than the one I wished I had?

I only recognized it as a pattern later, but I think it’s one of the real drivers of whatever I’ve built since then. Psychologists call the alternative learned helplessness: the gradual conviction that outcomes are outside your control, so why try. I’ve watched it keep people stuck in a way that focusing on your own situation doesn’t. When your energy is going toward the ledger of who had what, there’s not much left over for the actual work.

The world not being fair is a real observation. It’s also not something most of us can solve, and it tends to crowd out the question that’s actually answerable: what are you doing with what you have? Fairness and forward motion are two different problems, and you can really only work on one at a time.

Focusing inward wasn’t a virtue I cultivated, it was something I backed into out of necessity. But it turned out to be the most important thing, and I think about that when I see people stuck in the comparison, because I know that version of stuck from the inside. The ledger always balances, and it never moves you anywhere.

There’s a line from Mary Schmich’s essay, the one most people know as the Baz Luhrmann Sunscreen song, that has stayed with me: “Your choices are half chance.” I think that’s right, and I want to be clear that I believe it about my own life. A significant amount of where I am today comes down to timing, to crossing paths with the right people at the right moments, to circumstances that broke in my favor when they just as easily could have gone the other way. I’m not claiming I willed this into existence. The luck was real, and so is the gratitude I have for the people who showed up along the way.

What I’m saying is that the decision to focus on what I could actually do, rather than what I didn’t have, was the part that was mine to make. And it turned out to be the one that mattered most.